Accessing Build Configurations in Visual Studio Express Editions

Express editions of Microsoft Visual Studio are lightweight versions of the Microsoft Visual Studio product line. Express Editions were conceived beginning with Visual Studio 2005. The idea of Express editions, according to Microsoft, is to provide streamlined, easy-to-use and easy-to-learn IDEs for users other than professional software developers, such as hobbyists and students. [1]

Thus, a lot of Visual Studio features are hidden by default in Express editions to improve the "feel of easiness" for the beginners.

The one of the hidden features is an ability to manage build configurations for projects and solutions. You may want to ask why do you ever need to use several build configurations for a single project. Well, the answer is straightforward: to prune the debug information which is unneeded at runtime.

The 99.9% of consumers of your application won't debug it. They just do not want to do such kind of things. And most of the consumers do not know how to do this either.

That's why Visual Studio projects always have two build configurations: Debug and Release.

• Debug configuration is used during product development. Developers can step through the code, watch the variables, fix the code and so on. This is very handy from developers' point of view and this is used in Express editions by default
• Release configuration is used for product publishing. The program code gets highly optimized, detailed debug information is omitted, the size of the compiled binaries decreases. This is good for your customers — they don't need the debug either. This configuration is hidden in Express editions by default

As you might know, Eazfuscator.NET does its job in Release configuration. So, to obfuscate your projects you have to build them in Release configuration. This approach has a good correlation with product publishing when you are a professional on a full-featured Visual Studio edition (Standard and higher). If you know what I mean then you probably familiar with the user interface shown below:

To be able to use this nice and professional Debug/Release pattern in Visual Studio Express editions we must "unhide" the build configurations feature.

Visual Studio 2010 Express Editions

This is really easy in VS 2010. Go to Tools → Settings → Expert Settings menu item and click.

After that, you will find the following drop-down in your IDE at the main toolbar:

Select Release, then build and enjoy!

Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions

VS 2008 provides a more complicated way. Go to Tools → Options... menu item and click.

Options dialog will appear. Please ensure that Show all settings checkbox is set:

After that please navigate to Projects and Solutions → General node. Ensure that Show advanced build configurations checkbox is set. Press OK when done:

After that, you will find the following drop-down in your IDE at the main toolbar:

Select Release, then build and enjoy!

Back to the main page